Grim Tales by Norman Lock Page B

ever more truly upon what world remains.
    Matt Bell is the author of the fiction collection How They Were Found , and the editor of The Collagist .

F OR M AXWELL & M ALCOLM

… MERELY CURVING A MIRROR’S SURFACE CAN PLUNGE A MAN INTO AN IMAGINED WORLD …
    Umberto Eco

G RIM T ALES
    Norman Lock

Each morning when he woke, he found that his papers had been worked on during the night. His affairs were being put in order – no matter how he tried to resist it, this “settling of accounts.” No matter that, in desperation one night, he burnt the papers, including his last will and testament, which was now being written in a hand he did not recognize, leaving everything to his estranged wife, a woman whom he despised. Last night, having resigned himself, he took an overdose of sleeping pills, sufficient to stop his heart.

    The pebbles grew into stones, the stones into great rocks. The rocks reared up into mountains, which cast their shadows over the land – their cold shadows. Darkness fell on the fields and the town and on a woman pinning sheets onto the line, her mouth full of clothespins and her breasts taut and lifted against her blouse. When her husband looked out the window and saw her, desire rose up in him. When she came into the house, he laid her down on the unmade bed and covered her body with his own just as the first boulders broke loose from the mountains and the avalanches began.

    The cloud, which looked, they said, ominous – a roiling darkness minutely veined with fire – rolled over the city and, after a time, settled on a part of it “like a cupped hand.” No light could pierce it: not the light from the streetlamps or from the house windows. Those who walked inside the darkness wondered at it – how it clung to them, their clothes and hands. When it lifted the following day, that part of the city where it had been was as if erased.

    Because he had died under mysterious circumstances, an autopsy was performed. The coroner removed a bullet from the right ventricle; however, neither entrance nor exit wound could be found. The bullet was of a type used by snipers in the World War, during which the man’s father had been lost and presumed dead. The man had never known his father, whom the man’s mother hated still with a passion equal to her love for her son. The wound – the coroner observed – was perfect, as if the bullet had been “introduced into the heart by means other than a weapon.”

    At midnight, a man received a call from someone who assured him he would not see the sun rise; that he – the caller – was even now getting ready to come and murder him. Escape was impossible: the house was watched by confederates, impervious to bribes or entreaties. Shortly after putting down the phone, the man died of fear. He could not know that the caller had dialed the wrong number and that it was another man, in another part of the city, who did not see morning.

    Each morning he woke to find in his bed an instrument of destruction: knife, noose, capsule, an ice-cold gun that felt in his hand like the breast of a dead bird. At breakfast, he would watch his wife pour coffee, butter toast, carry the remains of toast to the sink – look at her closely, his face a question. But hers gave no hint in answer, of an intent to do away with him by moving him to thoughts of suicide. They lived together: there was no one else in the apartment but them. If not she, then who? he wondered. This morning he found a black silk band on his wife’s pillow and remembered how, during the night, he had dreamed of waking to find a black silk band on the pillow, had tied it round his eyes, and then, opening the window, had jumped. He woke, terrified and breathless, before reaching the street. Awake now, he takes the black silk and ties it round his eyes, jumps, and does not cease to scream until he hits the pavement. Later, searching the apartment, the